Seven Samurai

For this 100th blog post, I revisited Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954) after not seeing it for a quarter century. I've watched various forms of its remake over the years, though, like The Magnificent Seven (1960) and the computer-animated film A Bug's Life (1998), not to mention Justice League (2017), which I don't recall having seven heroes but read somewhere this was based on the DC Comics team (pictured below) which was created with Kurosawa's masterpiece in mind. Apocryphal? I don't know. Needless to say, Seven Samurai is revered by film lovers the world over, and there are all sorts of essays and articles and blog posts online discussing the movie and its major influence on cinema. What struck me on this viewing was that even though it's 207 minutes long it's gripping from beginning to end, and that's after having seen it already. Not many films can do this.